Editor's Note: This is
Part II of a series by former CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman addressing the
presidency and the Pentagon.

Part
I examined what President Dwight Eisenhower knew about the
military as a retired five-star general and what he tried to impart to his
successors. Part III will deal with President Obama's mishandling of the
military-industrial complex's power and what he should do:

Barack Obama's crippling
inheritance as President of the United States is the near-five-decade failure
of the nation's political leadership to heed President Dwight D. Eisenhower's
warning that "in the councils of government, we must guard against the
acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the
military-industrial complex."

This complex, according to Tom
Barry of the Center for International Policy, has now "morphed into a new type
of public-private partnership -- one that spans military, intelligence, and
homeland-security contracting -- that amounts to a "national security complex'."

Over the past three decades, despite
the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the
end of the Cold War, U.S. presidents have done next to nothing to challenge or
limit the national security complex, which continues to drain the federal
treasury and block any potential political threat to the military-industrial
status quo.

Through this period, reaching
from Ronald Reagan to Obama, military spending has continued to increase, with
the United States outspending the entire rest of the world on weapons systems.

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The $708 billion defense budget
for 2011 is higher than at any point in America's post-World War II history.
It is 16 percent higher than the 1952 Korean War budget peak and 36 percent
higher than the 1968 Vietnam War budget peak in constant dollars.

Yet some Pentagon leaders see
this spending level as restraint. Defense Secretary Robert Gates argues that
the budget plan "rebalances" spending by emphasizing near-term challenges of
counter-insurgency, counter-terrorism, and stabilization operations.

But the current budget plan makes
no effort at prioritizing these near-term commitments against funding for
long-term commitments. Instead, it increases funding for both near-term
and long-term programs. Despite complaints from deficit hawks, the
military-industrial hawks still rule the roost.

Overall procurement spending will
rise by nearly 8 percent in the 2011 budget, covering virtually all of the
equipment the services wanted. Historically, the costs to operate and maintain
the U.S. military tend to grow at about 2.5 percent. Not this year. The
basic defense budget request seeks more than $200 billion, or an 8.5 percent
increase, in funding for Operations and Maintenance.

Over the past three decades, the
military tool also has become the leading instrument of American statecraft.
The defense budget is 13 times larger than all U.S. civilian foreign policy
budgets combined, and the Defense Department's share of U.S. security
assistance has grown from 6 percent in 2002 to more than 50 percent in 2009,
when Obama was inaugurated.

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There are more members of the
military in marching bands than there are Foreign Service Officers, and the
Defense Department spends more on fuel ($16 billion) than the State Department
spends on operating costs ($13 billion). More than half of U.S.
discretionary spending is in the defense budget, and war spending only accounts
for half of the increase in defense spending since 1998.

All at Fault

All U.S. presidents since 1981
have contributed to the militarization of national security policy.